seems like with all the extra goodies that pop around xbmc (weather art, clearart, etc...) a minimalist approch, with options for the user to add his/hers own stuff is the way to go.
Nice work, as usual, djh_!

To make it even easier to mod and create different themes for could you possibly use a default.xml (location - XBMC/skin/<skin name>/colors/) for the different text/object colours?

I'm a step ahead of you there.

Whoops, there goes the bit about me already coding it. I couldn't help it, and it's actually rather important that I do both things at once.

For example, all the browsers and the Home menu use Apple-esque 'jogging' animations - tweens, in other words - to give them that extra zing. XBMC doesn't support those without loads of extra code, and the results can be rather sketchy. So the Home page you see there currently has this rather nice Bourne Identity thing going on, but it really doesn't work with that layout. So the layout will have to change.

The good news is that the Home page took three hours to build, so it's at least living up to the efficiency aspect. If it wasn't for the animations, you could build it in no time. I'd say they're the most important bit, though, especially when moving between windows.

@jm: I actually agree about that, but the wave of moaning that came with removing it from Aeon had me thinking I was alone.

I love how everything's so much more unified; the fanart's there but the way it's implimented it's a part of the skin rather than something that's just hidden by it.

Also, if high performance at 1080p is a goal, one thing that'd help keep views snappy might be to have fanart only displayed on a delay. So it would fade in the same way the old info view faded in, but the background would be the only part that would change.

I'm more than happy to look into it if it will do what it is you're after - it seems silly (and completely inefficient) to build a list from scratch if the default one can do what you want (or at least a close enough approximation of it).

Yeah, totally agree. This skin just looks awesome, I would even dare to say that I like it more than Aeon. I like this simplicity and sleek interface, comes with a great layout and design. djh, simply amazing, but I expected nothing less